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VIOLENT! #19 Free? CHECK! Kicking? Abso-fraggin-lutely!

factorfi — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:20:00 +0000

Violent! #19 (Click to open or right click to save)

56 pages [19.5MB]

Cover by Al Davison

Space Dude by Darren Douglas

See A Penny, Pick It Up by Jay Eales and Graeme Neil Reid

Tales From The Murk: Getting the Boot by Curt Sibling

Dr Sorrow & the Cargo of Death by Adrian Kermode and Mike Juniper

The Silent Service by Jay Eales and Paul McCaffrey

Tales From the Murk: Market Splash by Curt Sibling

Bang! by Alex Smith

Hard-Boiled Hitler: Episode Zwolf – One Man and Someone Else’s Dog by Mike Sivier and Stephen Prestwood

VIOLENT! #18 – Still FREE and still Kicking!

factorfi — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:15:07 +0000

VIOLENT #18 (click to open or right click to save)

56 pages [16.4MB]

Cover by Kev Levell

Space Dude by Darren Douglas

Knuckles by Jay Eales and Chris Askham

The Silent Service by Jay Eales and Paul McCaffrey

Total Fear: Scuffle of the Titans by Curt Sibling

Made Men by Jay Eales and Charley Spencer

S.S.O.B. by Alex Smith

Jonbar Hinge: Take me To Your Cleaner 2 by Jay Eales and Andy Radbourne

Hard-Boiled Hitler: Episode Elf – Private Lives! by Mike Sivier and Stephen Prestwood

Hope you like it! Look out for issue #19 in three months.

If you missed VIOLENT! #17, go here.

BORDERLINE BLOG: Why You Should be reading

factorfi — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:43:55 +0000

WHY YOU SHOULD BE READING PETRA ETCETERA

[Originally published in BORDERLINE #1 August 2001]

PETRA ETCETERA is the latest title to come out of Gratuitous Bunny Comix, stalwarts of the UK small press scene for over 12 years. GBC were originally formed by writer Dave McKinnon and artist Terry Wiley, publishing titles such as Sleaze Castle, Tales From Sleaze Castle and Surreal School Stories. In recent years, they were joined by a second writer, Adrian Kermode, and the seeds of spin-off title Petra Etcetera were sown. However, Dave McKinnon recently announced his retirement from comics, because his enthusiasm had waned. Coming hot on the heels of winning this year’s National Comic Award for Best Self published/Indy Comic at COMICS 2001 in Bristol, there has been much speculation about what the future holds for the Bunnies. Jay Eales spoke to Terry Wiley and Adrian Kermode:

JAY: Can we start with a short but sweet potted history of Gratuitous Bunny Comix?

TERRY: Dave had the idea to do a comic in 1987, but we didn’t actually get round to finishing it until 1989! The Gratuitous Bunny angle came about when one of our readers noticed the bunny in More Tales #1 and said she would buy it if we put the bunny in as much as possible – hence various, indeed gratuitous, appearances of the bunny! We thought we were in a minority of one until the small press review zine ZUM! came out and showed us there were dozens of other groovy comics out there as well. We were selling quite well direct through shops by about 1992-94, when Tales came out, and were picked up by Diamond in 1995. Dave was finding it harder to write by then, so spin-offs like Tales and Surreal School Stories were designed to give him a breather, but he decided to give up altogether in 1996. He later came back to do issues 7 and 8, but was flagging again with #9, so I drafted in an extra writer – Adrian – to do a backup story Petra Etcetera. Eventually Dave admitted he hates writing anyway, and had no inclination to do anything any more, so….

Dave McKinnon

ADY: But even though they started off as a small press venture Terry and Dave took it seriously from the start. Gratuitous Bunny were the first independent/ self-published outfit to adopt the American comic book format and professional production values, and the first to publish reprint collections in trade paperback format, and both of those have since become the norm with the likes of Paul Grist’s Kane and Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven. And of course, this year all that time and effort and quality paid off when we

finally won the National Comic Award after years of being nominated.

JAY: Ady and Billy: How did you come to be involved in GBC?

Adrian Kermode

ADY: Well, Terry and I have known each other over 20 years, so I followed More Tales from the start, and I actually contributed a one page filler to an early issue. Their stuff was completely unlike anything else being done at the time – totally genre defying – and when Terry and Dave asked if I wanted to do Petra Etcetera, I was just chuffed to become a part of that and play with their toys. Unfortunately Billy can’t be with us today because of the restraining orders, but when Terry was up against a very tight deadline to produce Petra #2 in time for Caption 2000, we brought Billy in to do the back page pin-up. We were so pleased with the result it’s now a regular feature.

JAY: How did the Petra spin-off from Sleaze Castle come about?

TERRY: I came up with another story Adrian could do which could attach to the rest of the mythos with minimal impact. The only point of contact is Petra, who hasn’t really been in the main storyline THAT much…

ADY: It was originally just going to be a back-up strip, to give Dave a breather by only doing 12 pages of script an issue. But, after the “two-in-one” format of Petra #1/More Tales #9, it was decided to make Petra a full spinoff series while the main story continued in collected book form.

JAY: Would you like to attempt to sum up what the book is about for the boys and girls out there who may have been unaware of what they’re missing?

TERRY: It’s the story of Jo’s wacky sister Petra and her friends, involving a lot of drinking, snogging and the occasional fight, plus the emotional interplay between Jo and Petra.

ADY: But it’s also an age-old “love triangle” tale involving Petra, her boyfriend and a mysterious stranger who keeps turning up. There is a long term plot underlying it all, though, and I have a definite end in mind that I’m working towards – a bit like James

Robinson’s Starman but with less spandex and more sex. And don’t forget the “Etcetera” – Petra’s friends take centre stage from time to time, though Petra and the main plot will still be bubbling away in the background.

JAY: Petra is a more naturalistic book than Sleaze Castle, distinctly lacking in Little Happy Creatures running amok. I could easily see Petra fitting in the same playground as Nick Abadzis’ later Hugo Tate stories in Deadline. Is that the sort of niche you’re going for?

TERRY: We didn’t have Hugo Tate in mind, although Tales has been compared to it. I suppose deep down Dave wanted to do Cerebus, a convoluted, multi-layered non-naturalistic story, whereas I wanted to do Love & Rockets, more of a day-to-day, on-the-street sort of thing, which I suppose the general reader has less trouble getting into.

ADY: I definitely see Petra in the Love & Rockets mould. Real life is just as dramatic as any space opera or spandex fantasy to those living it. Whether or not that gorgeous blonde I met and liked so much ever gets in touch with me again is more important to me than the end of the world. It’s easy to use Doc Doom’s latest world destroying frammistat to generate suspense and entertain your readers, but it’s more challenging to make them care about your characters and the minutiae of their “lives” in a more naturalistic story.

JAY: Do you find the period setting of the series in the eighties as a hindrance or a strength of the book?

TERRY: It just turned out that way because the publishing gap is so much longer than the action of the story, plus to avoid stepping on Dave’s toes, every spin off story had to take place before the ‘main’ plot. I think the readers would kill us if we tried to do a ‘year zero’ thing and time-shift everything into the 21st Century! I don’t mind sticking to the timeline – it’s not that much different is it? Not like it was the Stone Age!

ADY: I find it more irritating than a hindrance. I’d love to do some witty social commentary stuff about today’s society; the way teenagers are mutating into some strange species of hybrid cyborgs with cellphones and backwards baseball caps permanently melded to their heads, for example, but the setting precludes that. There’s always a danger that it may eventually alienate any new readers who do regard anything before they were born as the “Stone Age”. But in 1985 Terry and I were about the same age as our characters are supposed to be so we have a lot of actual experiences to mine for stories.

JAY: It’s interesting to note that for an all-male creative team, all GBC titles seem to have female protagonists. Why do you think that is?

TERRY: Um… partly because in so many other stories women get nothing better to do than be rescued, or sport enormous tits and fire guns… all the other ‘grown-up’ media have no problems with depicting regular women in regular roles – why shouldn’t comics? Plus female characters can get away with a much broader range and wardrobe than stuffy males can – they’re more fun to draw.

ADY: Almost all of my close friends are women and, while I don’t have any blinding insights into the female psyche, they have taught me how to fake a pretty good orgasm (laughs). A lot of Petra is based on events and experiences that actually happened to those friends (and three of the characters are based on them) so I have a wealth of anecdotes and material to draw from that I hope gives the book a more realistic feel. Besides – women are just more interesting to write for.

JAY: What sort of readership does Petra attract? Is there a big female following? Who is your target audience?

ADY: We seem to go down well with the university crowd, who can probably relate to the setting and situations, regardless of the time period. I do feel self-conscious about being a man writing for female characters, but a lot of our readers are women so I suppose

we’re getting something right. Our target audience is just anyone and everyone who we can part from their cash.

TERRY: It’s a bit funny – we don’t meet the audience that often! From those we have seen it seems to be about 50/50, which isn’t bad for a comic. I suppose we’re aiming for the sort of person who generally doesn’t read comics at all, since they outnumber the ones who do 19-1!

JAY: With an Eagle nomination after Petra’s debut in Sleaze Castle #9’s flipbook format, and the recent win at the Comics 2001

National Comic Awards, do you intend to ramp up production on Petra in order to capitalise on the higher profile it has right now,

especially in light of the sad discontinuation of the main Sleaze Castle title?

TERRY: Um, as you probably know, nearly everyone in comics these days needs a ‘real’ job on the side to keep body and soul together! So, short of a mighty lottery win, the output will remain fairly sparse, but constant! I’d go so far as to say we’ll bring out at least two new items a year, be they Petra or something else.

ADY: Well I have the next two issues of Petra plotted and partly written so those would be my choice for the two new items we put out this year! However, with Dave’s departure and the discontinuing of the main Sleaze Castle storyline, now would also be a good time to retain that readership with the launch of Beautiful Freak, which is sort of Panda’s origin story. This is something Terry and I will have to discuss down a dark alley with pieces of lead pipe, I think.

JAY: Why so long between issues? Is it purely for financial reasons, or more to do with Terry doing almost all of the art?

Terry Wiley

TERRY: Yep, as it stands, if I don’t draw it, it doesn’t come out! And I can only draw when I get time…

JAY: Would you contemplate bringing on board another artist or collaborator to ease the workload, or is it too personal to let go?

TERRY: Oboy, that’s a tough one! In my egotistical stance I’d say I’d like to either draw or write everything in the comic, so any new artists would be drawing my stuff. I’d hate to get to the point where both me and Dave end up retired and watching someone else playing with our toys!

ADY: I still see Petra very much as the spin-off of the main story, and as such would be happy to let another artist loose on it if that meant Terry was free to produce Beautiful Freak. But any new artist would have to be pretty good to ensure we don’t lose the high standard Terry’s set. And they’d have to be pretty cheap too because they wouldn’t get paid!

JAY: On a related theme, will Billy be doing any full strips for GBC, or does he prefer to do one-off illustrations?

Billy Armstrong

TERRY: Billy is a jolly nice chap and a good egg! However, he is a perfectionist and without regular jolts from an electric cattle prod is apt to take as long to draw as Dave does to write! We haven’t anything lined up for him yet, but I see no reason why he shouldn’t contribute in that way.

ADY: I’ve seen his strip work and he’s almost as good as Terry, but slower. I’d be happy to let him have a go at Petra, but only if Terry acted in an editorial capacity – the Sleaze Castle mythos has a distinct visual style and I wouldn’t want to damage that.

JAY: Terry, tell us more about this side project Beautiful Freak that keeps getting mentioned?

TERRY: Beautiful Freak was of course inspired by the eponymous Eels song, and turns out to be the literal translation of Panda’s full name, “Pandadomino”. It’ll be the epic story of Panda and her family from birth up to her ascension to the throne of Sleaze Castle. God knows when I’ll get time to do it! It’ll need a ton of background worked out, and enough plot to occupy the cast for about 30 years! But we’ll at least get to find out who all those sisters of Panda’s are, plus what happened to everybody else who used to live there…

JAY: I understand that there are plans to bring out a reprint collection of Petra, possibly incorporating extra material. What can you tell us about that?

TERRY: Well, Adrian has already written at least three extra scenes which go in between the issues to expand on the plot. And after a long hard look at Petra #3 we have to admit it does lurch along a bit in places, especially the end, so we’ll expand #3 by another 12 pages or so. All told, we’ll then have enough Petra for a Director’s Cut-sized book, which we would bring out after the original issues have sold out – late 2002?

JAY: What’s next for Petra?

TERRY: I believe we finally get to meet Petra’s best friend in the next one! Adrian?

ADY: No, her best friend’s called Lydia, not Adrian. (THWAP!) Ouch.

UPDATE May 2010: In the intervening years, there has been good news and some extremely bad news.

The long-awaited Petra Etcetera collection, with extra material is now available to buy from Lulu here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/petra-etcetera/6202841

The bad news is that it is dedicated to the memory of Ady Kermode, who sadly passed away just over a year ago. Miss you, big fella.

BORDERLINE BLOG: Unbreakable

factorfi — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:01:42 +0000

Between August 2001 and April 2003, Borderline: The Comics Magazine was a free monthly PDF format magazine, edited by Phil Hall, ably assisted by a motley crew of knowledgeable comic-heads such as Mike Kidson, Martin Shipp, Andy Winter, Andrew Cheverton, Danny Black, Mike Sivier and my good self, in the News Features Editor role. Starting from nothing, with a production budget of tuppence, Borderline was, if anything too far ahead of the curve, and while the readership reached a peak of over 141,000, racked up a National Comics Award for Best Comics Magazine or Website in 2002, at the time we found it impossible to translate that into a viable business model.

The rise and fall of Borderline would make for an entire blog of its own (maybe even a major motion picture…), but I’m bringing it up now because I want to get some of the features I did for it back out into the world. If nothing else, they should prove to be interesting cultural artifacts of an earlier time, starting with this feature from Borderline #1 in August 2001.

Re-reading it, I’m particularly amused by the tone, heaping praise on M. Night Shyamalan, then on only his second movie, and look what’s happened to his career since then… In only nine years, his films have become more and more derided, and it seems that he has been forced to abandon his writer/director mantle to direct a work for hire adaptation of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Between films, the rumour mill starts up about a potential sequel for Unbreakable, but I’m not sure if I want the director of The Lady in the Water and The Happening to go back to meddle with his earlier success. Unless of course, it sparks a creative resurgence, of course.

Also interesting to think that back when I wrote this original piece, Tim Burton’s Batman was still the blueprint for the Dark Knight Detective on celluloid, and yet nowadays, it seems like Batman has been Christopher Nolan’s property forever.

In future Borderline Blogs, I’ll no doubt get into the ups and downs a bit, reproduce some of the interviews I did across the twenty issues we put out, and I’m thinking of doing a Where Are They Now feature on Borderline alumni, to catch up on some old friends and see what they’re up to these days. As a design exercise, I had a go at refreshing the Borderline logo and cover dress, as though it had returned. And for a few days, there was a chance that it might, but then cooler heads prevailed. Here’s to what might have been!

THE MOST IMPORTANT COMICS FILM EVER?

Could a Bruce Willis movie possibly change the general public’s attitude towards comicbooks? Jay Eales investigates…

UNBREAKABLE

THE most important film, as far as the superhero genre in particular is concerned, was not made in 1989. Neither was it an adaptation of an existing work, though some similarity with realistic worldview superhero comics can be identified. The film in question was not accompanied by the rolling out of a merchandising bandwagon. It stars A-list talent in Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, and manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of the genre. You can lay responsibility for that squarely at the feet of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, whose previous film, The Sixth Sense, breathed fresh life into the ghost story. He then brought the sensibilities of that film to bear on Unbreakable; slowly pacing, with the emphasis firmly placed on dialogue and characterisation rather than leaping from set-piece to set-piece. The concept is simple enough: a man discovers that he is a superhero. Nothing too earth shattering there, you might think, but Shyamalan chooses to present his story without a hint of camp, Adam West-style antics, or even the Goth fairy tale posturing of Tim Burton’s reinvention of the Dark Knight in Batman.

REAL LIFE DOESN’T FIT INTO LITTLE BOXES THAT WERE DRAWN FOR IT

The film opens and closes with onscreen captions, and while I won’t spoil the ending for you it should be acknowledged that this big Hollywood production dares to have these words as the first things the audience sees: “There are 35 pages and 124 illustrations in the average comic book. A single issue ranges in price from $1.00 to over $140,000. 172,000 comics are sold in the U.S. every day. Over 62,780,000 each year. The average comic collector owns 3,312 comics and will spend approximately 1 year of his or her life reading them.”

THERE IS A SOLE SURVIVOR, AND HE IS MIRACULOUSLY UNHARMED

Unbreakable is the story of two flawed men – one with unbreakable bones, one who suffers from the disease osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes his bones to shatter at the least impact – and how their lives intersect. There are no comic book absolutes of good and evil here, just all the hues in between. In fact, part of Shyamalan’s style is the clever use of colour in his movies. In The Sixth Sense, the colour red was used as an indicator of supernatural interference. In Unbreakable, as Bruce Willis’ character, David Dunn, starts to accept the possibility that he may be more than mortal, the people he interacts with wear more primary colours than others in the film. As Elijah Price, Samuel L Jackson plays the owner of an art gallery, specialising in comic art, giving Shyamalan (and comic collector Jackson) a mouthpiece with which to elevate the medium of comics from the preconception of it as a thing of childhood value alone.

In Shyamalan’s own words, “This is normally the first act of a movie, this whole movie. And I’m going to make an entire movie about a guy realising he’s a superhero.” This was not his initial plan, however. “We started out with a very traditional movie, where the first act was him realising his powers, second act was him fighting good and bad, and in the third act he’s fighting the ultimate villain,” but Shyamalan found himself unable to connect with the character of David Dunn as he would have been in acts two and three, in the way he did with him in the act one. Great pains were taken to maintain an air of hyper-realism in the film – it is not quite believable, and yet the emotional reactions seem honest, and allow a suspension of disbelief. No spandex costume for this superhero; Dunn wears the waterproof hooded poncho from his day job as a security guard at a Philadelphia sports stadium, a clever real world analogy of the cape and cowl of more outlandish comic book heroes such as The Spectre.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE SCARIEST THING IS? TO NOT KNOW YOUR PLACE IN THIS WORLD

While Unbreakable has not eclipsed Shyamalan’s biggest hit, The Sixth Sense, the film has performed successfully. It opened well, but did not display the extraordinary staying power of the previous film, which has now racked up more than $160 million. Unbreakable’s US box office takings to date are estimated at $95 million. In its recent release for rental video and DVD, it took $17.2 million in its opening week and topped VideoScan’s First Alert DVD sales chart for the week ending July 1st, knocking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from the top spot. Not bad for a superhero movie that dared to be different, eh?

UNBREAKABLE ON DVD

The DVD Region 1 release of Unbreakable contains the usual complement of special features that fans of the format have come to expect, but there are two items of particular note to comics fans. One is two collectible illustrations by artist Alex Ross, who was involved in the production from an early stage; the other, more importantly, is a twenty-minute documentary entitled Comic Books and Superheroes. It features contributions from a host of famous comic creators and Samuel L Jackson, who reveals his passion for comics and reminisces about growing up with Archie and Veronica and collecting Superman comics. He also reveals his technique for encouraging friends to get into the hobby: “If I had someone that didn’t know a lot about comics, I would take them into the comic book store, and depending on their sensibilities, I would give them all the Frank Miller I could find.”

Other participants in the documentary include Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, Alex Ross, Trina Robbins, Denny O’Neil, Frank Miller, Michael Chabon and Dave Gibbons, talking about the medium they work in, and how the superhero genre came to dominate it. Images are drawn from Sin City, Go Girl! and The Spirit, with art design by Alex Ross. Will Eisner goes into detail about how the Spirit came into being, and how he developed a technique for using panel layouts in order to get around pacing problems: “Panels, I learned, became part of the vocabulary, the punctuation. They affect the rate of reading; they affect the psychological approach that you take to the story. They can convey claustrophobia [and] they can convey openness.” Frank Miller elaborates, “I’m mad about the idea of closure […] how much the eye can do with how little information, which I think is the entire science of comic books. I mean, you only get one image out of a potential thousand as you read a comic book. You’re creating so many between those panels, it’s wonderful!”

The documentary ranges from the early days of comics and the contribution of Jewish immigrants and their children to the melting pot of superheroes, to how in the Eighties, with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and their ilk, superheroes began to get darker and grittier, diminishing the heroic archetype. Michael (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) Chabon describes the Man of Steel thus: “It’s very easy to look at the Superman story as being at least in part the story of an immigrant; an immigrant from another world. And of course, Siegel and Shuster, these were two sons of immigrants.” Trina Robbins adds: “It seems that the majority of them grew up in New York, grew up in either the slums or at least working class neighbourhoods. These kids lived in apartment buildings – they didn’t live in single family dwellings in the suburbs. […] They were brought up on the American Dream.” Dave Gibbons, on the subject of Watchmen’s genesis, says: “Supposing superheroes really existed […] and there was a real Superman, for instance. What would he be like? When you extrapolate from that, you realise that the people that were given superpowers, or who decided to fight crime, might do it for much more human reasons than just this kind of abstract ‘I have been gifted with powers, so I must save the world!’” Frank Miller again: “I don’t need a character to be able to fly […] to be heroic to me. There ain’t that much difference between a cape and a trenchcoat anyway.” The documentary packs a lot into its twenty minutes, and incredibly, apart from the briefest of comments, doesn’t refer to the movie at all. This is no fluff piece. I take great heart in knowing that film-makers like Shyamalan are out there, acting as ambassadors for the comics medium, bringing it into thousands of homes that might otherwise remain ignorant of comics outside of Lois and Clark, or the last Batman or X-Men summer blockbuster. May this be seen as a blueprint for future film-makers: superhero movies don’t have to be made with one eye on a franchise and the other on the CGI special effects budget. [From Borderline #1: August 2001]

VIOLENT! #17 – It’s FREE and good for you!

factorfi — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:49:42 +0000

VIOLENT #17 (click to open or right click to save)

60 pages [18.4MB]

Cover by Darren Winter

The Silent Service by Jay Eales and Paul McCaffrey

Space Dude by Darren Douglas

Knuckles by Jay Eales and Chris Askham

The Sexy Thief With No Name! by Finn Clark and Jay Rainford-Nash

S.S.O.B. by Alex Smith

Jonbar Hinge: Take me To Your Cleaner by Jay Eales and Andy Radbourne

Hard-Boiled Hitler: Episode Zehn – Bitte Surrender by Mike Sivier and Stephen Prestwood

Hope you like it! Look out for issue #18 in three months.

Time Flies…

factorfi — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:38:28 +0000

…when you’re fighting hackers. Yes, the Violent! and Girly Comic websites have been idle for a while, you may have noticed. Selina goes into all the gory details on the Girly blog, so I won’t repeat it all here. The important thing is that we’re back!

The current gameplan, after a few years of bringing out paper issues of Violent! two or three times a year, is to do two things:

1) Increase our frequency to a strict quarterly schedule, beginning in May.

2) As with The Girly Comic, we’re stepping back from print publishing for a while. Online only. If you’re a paper junkie, and god knows, I am, sorry about that, but on the upside, it’s all free, baby!

We’ll be putting new issues of Violent! together in PDF form the same as we always have, but instead of printing, folding and stapling, we’ll just be releasing them into the wild for free download every three months. Oh, and we’ll also be continuing a rolling programme of putting strips from the archive up on the webcomic blog.

Well, that’ll do it for now, I think. Hope you enjoy the changes, and let us know what you think.

Spread the word!

Jay

We’d like to thank the Academy

factorfi — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:47:26 +0000

Well, blimey! What can we say? On Sunday afternoon, we received an email notifying us that The Girly Comic Book Volume 1 has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Comic/ Graphic Novel.

Nominated and voted on by members of the British Fantasy Society. If you’re a member of the BFS, and helped us to make the shortlist, then thank you so much. It was quite a surprise, as we hadn’t checked the longlist, so didn’t realise we were on that either! Wish us luck for the final vote, which closes on August 1st, and the result will be announced over the weekend of September 18th-20th at the FantasyCon convention in Nottingham. For more information on FantasyCon, check out:
http://www.fantasycon.org.uk

Voting is open to current members of the British Fantasy Society, attendees of FantasyCon 2008 and those who have already registered for FantasyCon 2009. If you’re eligible to vote, we’d really appreciate it if you considered supporting us again. Competition for the award is fierce, so we can do with all the help we can muster!

Our esteemed opposition are:

All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely (DC)
30 Days of Night: Beyond Barrow by Steve Niles/Bill Sienkiewicz (IDW)
Comic Book Tattoo by Rantz Hoseley/Tori Amos/various (Image)
The New Avengers: Illuminati by Brian Bendis/Brian Reed/Jim Cheung (Marvel)
Hellblazer: Fear Machine by Jamie Delano/Richard Piers Rayner/Mark Buckingham/various (Vertigo)
Hellblazer: The Laughing Magician by Andy Diggle/Leonardo Manco/Daniel Zezelj (Vertigo)
Locke & Key by Joe Hill/Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Buffy Season 8 Vol 3: Wolves At The Gate by Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard/Georges Jeanty (Dark Horse)

Win or lose, it’s great being invited to the party, and being able to say that we’ve been shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award, but just dreaming for a little while. How great would it be to actually win?

Jay and Selina

Factor Fiction @ BICS & Thought Bubble

factorfi — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:53:05 +0000

Factor Fiction will have a stall at the upcoming Birmigham International Comics Show (4-5th Oct) http://www.thecomicsshow.co.uk/

We’ll have new comics in the form of The Girly Comic #18, Violent! #14 plus a few copies of the MCR comic: The Fiend in Five Dimensions!

We were also hoping to launch The Girly Comic Book Vol 1, but printing delays mean we will now be launching that at Thought Bubble in Leeds on 15th Nov http://www.thoughtbubblefestival.com/08home.asp

The Girly Comic Book will be a 280 page hardback edition.

Hope to see lots of you at the events.

luv & jellybabies
Selina & Jay

…and We’re Back!

factorfi — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:51:21 +0000

Sorry about the hiatus in putting up pages for your delectation. The last few months have been taken up with a multitude of other projects, such as organising the Caption small press convention in August, and finalising the proofs for our next books, Shelf Life and The Girly Comic Book 1, as we gave you a sneak peek recently.

But here we are to save the day! See you on a daily (mostly!) basis.

Coming Soon: The Girly Comic Book Volume 1

factorfi — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:31:00 +0000

Here’s a sneak peek at what should be the next major release from Factor Fiction – collecting strips from across the first seventeen issues of The Girly Comic in a shelf-friendly perfect bound edition, under a gorgeous Dez Taylor cover. Further down the line will be The Girly Comic Book Volume 2, collected strips from Violent! and Crazycrone: The Lee Kennedy Collection. And tomorrow, the world!

The Girly Comic Book Volume 1 will, all things being equal, debut at the Birmingham International Comics Show this October.